Today Big Data application fabric provider Continuuity announces the public beta for the company’s developer suite and application sandbox enabling PaaS Big Data. October of last year saw commentary on the SDK and other developer tools released by Continuuity into private beta and now much of that hard work is coming to a head for the community.

Today’s announcement opens into two important highlights: the release of Continuuity’s runtime (called AppFabric) along with the development framework to use it and the release of a developer sandbox that permits same-as-production testing of Big Data applications on the AppFabric.

“With the combination of our Developer Suite and AppFabric editions, we accelerate time to business value, slash provisioning times, and make building Big Data apps easy and fast for any developer, ” said Todd Papaioannou, co-founder and CEO at Continuuity.

The major announcement at this year’s Stata has been about how Continuuity is moving with heavy footfalls into public Big Data. The developer suite comes with the full range of expected components including building blocks, API, code samples, etc. i.e. anything to facilitate rapidly building Big Data applications.

Papaioannou added, “Our customers can build and deploy applications in minutes and hours, not weeks or months. The public beta launch of both the Continuuity Developer Suite and Developer Sandbox will give developers the chance to experience the full end-to-end Continuuity application lifecycle.”

This prototype-to-actual speed is unfettered from having to run the Big Data application on dedicated hardware because AppFabric can be run locally on a more concise subset of the expected Big Data in order to test and prepare for the production environment.

Even in the local version, HBase and Hadoop emulation run beneath a real version of AppFabric. As Papaioannou explains, the local and production AppFabric environments should operate identically. This means that devs can develop, test, and run their application against the AppFabric locally before launching it into the cloud.

From a DevOps perspective this means that development teams will have a better way to making sure that ops will have less trouble integrating. This sort of CloudOps coordination also means that Continuuity will be appearing at Stata 2013 where SiliconANGLE is covering more Big Data announcements and reveals.

Developer sandbox for local or cloud development with AppFabric

One of the important natures of Continuuity’s service is that it allows developers to abstract away the lowest level Big Data programming and processing. Via the service, providing a platform and an API to use it, developers can approach their Big Data application without having to worry about the nuts-and-bolts while letting Continuuity do the heavy lifting.

The AppFabric developer sandbox gives developers “access to 8 cores, 8 GB of memory and 240 GB of storage” on Continuuity’s PaaS cloud that provisions a segment of the Big Data infrastructure. Currently in public beta, the sandbox permits developers to experience the Continuuity product suite end-to-end.
The sandbox also means that developers will know how their application will behave and how to use the Continuuity suite before they deploy it.

Continuuity is about providing infrastructure at lower cost for ease of development

“Ultimately, customers want to pay for and create business value, rather than infrastructure,” says Papaioannou. “These types of applications will dramatically increase the size of the Big Data market, bringing the power of Big Data to companies that might otherwise have been unable to benefit from this new wave of data.”

As the market stands, much of the BIg Data market is aimed at the enterprise. Big Data scientists are grooming themselves for the wave that analysis and business intelligence and for corporate culture.

However, Big Data and its outgrowths will also affect small and medium businesses (and developers themselves) may be feeling a little left out due to the computation constraints and the hardware needed to ply their trade.

By providing AppFabric both as on-site hardware providing the AppFabric suite as well as a virtual cloud that can deploy the PaaS, Continuuity seeks to do exactly that.